“Ghost Acres,” Virtual Landscapes, and the Industrial Revolution

George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History Emeritus, Brown University

According to Matt Ridley, Europe's dramatic increase in wealth after 1750 depended upon three things, the first of which
“was an increasing division of labour that meant
that each person could produce more each year and therefore
could consume more each year, which created the demand for
still more production” (201). Citing the historian Kenneth Pomeranz, he points two additional factors

vital to Europe's achievement: coal and
America. The ultimate reason that the British economic take-
off kept on going where the Chinese — or for that matter, the
Dutch, Italian, Arab, Roman, Mauryan, Phoenician or Meso-
potamian — did not was because the British escaped the
Malthusian fate. The acres they needed to provide themselves with corn, cotton, sugar, tea and fuel just kept on materialising
elsewhere. Here are Pomeranz's numbers: in around 1830,
Britain had seventeen million acres of arable land, twenty-five
million acres of pastureland and less than two million acres of
forest. But she consumed sugar from the West Indies equivalent
(in calories) to the produce of at least another two million acres
of wheat; timber from Canada equivalent to another one million
acres of woodland, cotton from the Americas equivalent to the
wool produced on an astonishing twenty-three million acres of
pastureland, and coal from underground equivalent to fifteen
million acres of forest. Without these vast 'ghost acres' Britain's
industrial revolution, which was only just starting to raise living
standards in 1830, would have already shuddered to a halt for
lack of calories, cotton or coal.

Not only did the Americas ship back their produce; they also
allowed a safety valve for emigration to relieve the Malthusian
pressure of the population boom induced by industrialisation.
[201-202; emphasis added]